It's the last gasp upgrade of obsolete platform thing. 5x86 and dx5s held price through the late 90s for that, then fast K6-2s, 3s and pluses took over, then barton XPs, then fast Phenom IIs for AM2+ now FX for AM3+, AM4 is at an end, stock up on zens when they go selloff cheap and sell a couple of years later.

DDR3 is about bottoming out now, grab that while you can, it's about to go rarer and spendier for a couple of years. Large DDR2 peaked and is on the way back down now.

Yes, it's crazy right?
I know my son(who is in his mid 20's) still uses his FX 8350 happily as his main gaming PC though. With 16 GB RAM, a decent mid/high range Radeon of last gen(I forgot the model TBH, but it was £180 in 2019 and has 8GB) and a Samsung 1TB SSD it does just fine for all his stuff.
So today in 2021 these 8-core FX chips are actually better than they were in 2012/2013, 8 threads makes them more than good enough to power a 1080p capable GPU now games and OS are more "thread aware", they are better today than the 4 core/8 thread intel CPU's that handed them there arse back in the day for today's software.
Off hand I know he plays DOTA2, Hades, Genshin Impact, Outer Worlds, Borderlands 3 and a bunch of others too.
I guess if you have an older AM3 motherboard(even if you don't, those are still cheap last time I looked), the FX 8xxx CPU makes sense as a simple-ish upgrade, DDR3 RAM is dirt cheap, a £80 SATA SSD gives you fast storage, so bringing an older machine back upto full speed gaming is cheap and easy.(well it was before the CPU's went through the roof!)
I'm using an old Intel X58 with a 6 core/12 thread Xeon for gaming, now those CPU's are still dirt cheap, but the motherboards are frighteningly expensive, so if you don't have a board already, it doesn't make sense to try to build one now.
Also I guess many people are building machines with older or weaker GPU's as it's all they can get, so a FX is more than enough for those. I don't know anyone who cares a fig for windows 11, so that's not a big issue I've seen either on the second hand gaming market either.

So X58, cheap CPU's, expensive motherboards.
FX 8xxx cheap motherboards, expensive CPU's.
I guess it entirely depends on what hardware you already have to decide what makes sense.

No idea where your located, but CEX in the UK has FX CPU's much, much cheaper than ebay, might be worth a look.
FX 8350 is £58. FX 8120 is £35 for example, they also have a 2 year warranty on all hardware.

People with less reason than money. You can get Ryzen 1600/1700 with a motherboard and some RAM for that price.

So X58, cheap CPU's, expensive motherboards.

Not that expensive now due obsolete BIOS, which has problems with modern GPUs, NVMEs, etc.

Its stupid. They are the crappiest platform made since the original Pentium4. I upgraded from a FX based platform to an i7 platform only a few years more recent, but the difference in performance and stability was shocking. Almost enough to make me swear off AMD for life, however the recent success of Ryzen has softened that view a bit.

To be fair, insane prices for old AMD CPUs is nothing new. Ludicrous prices for some Phenom II CPUs, especially 6 core, were not some unheard-of occurrence.

AMD FX chips and platforms are really, really bad. I can't believe how deluded people are over this platform .... the high quoted core counts and high clock speeds do not make this platform any good, just run hotter and consume more power.

Just get a cheap i5/i7 ... way cheaper and much faster than the AMD FX crap.

Ryzen is a different ball game though.

I have a computer with a Phenom II X6 1100T and an Asus M5A99X, a few months ago I wanted to update the processor due to the lack of SSE 4.1 and I found the crazy price of the FX 8350 and although I have always liked buying AMD more and I have many more computers Based on AMD than Intel, that update did not make sense to me, the FX line was worse than the Phenom II line despite being later, they were not complete cores, the only advantage of the FX are the new sets of instructions that the Phenon II doesn't have and it makes them much less useful today. In the end for a little more than the price of an FX 8350 on ebay I ended up buying a Xeon E5 1620 V2 with a motherboard board and 32GB DDR3 in Quad channel that far exceeds what would have been upgrading to the FX 8350. In these cases, the logic and the reason over the heart.

A few years back when Newegg was clearing out the last new stock FX-8350 for cheap ($50?) I snagged one with a new Gigabyte AM3+ motherboard and it was decent.

Granted an i7-3770 I have blows it out of the water for single threaded apps but the setup didn't cost that much considering it was new and had plenty of rebates.

Anyway people collect what they want to collect and since the Ryzen has AMD flying people collect the older stuff. Prices are up because of supply and demand since Intel CPU production dwarfed that of AMD.

In my opinion the only bad think about the FX platform was power consumption. I used an FX 8350 in my main desktop pc from 2013 to 2019. With decent cooling, like EVO 212, heat was not an problem. The price to performance ratio performance was ok. I paid around 180€ for the cpu in 2013. For that money I guess I could have bought some lowly i3 model back then.

Even if I had ok experience with FX cpus I wouldn't recommend them with those crazy ebay prices. For example used R5 1600s can be had around the same price and it kicks ass of all those old intel and amd cpus 😀

(screenshot from https://youtu.be/qCFeWb4skhE?t=149)

I believe the AMD Piledriver arch is the last one which lacks the "hardware backdoor" a.k.a. trust zone, platform security processor, or management engine. That could be one point of appeal? Although X4 760K processors are cheap.

These AM3, AM3+, FM2 motherboards also have better compatibility with older operating systems. Some of them still have BIOS (not UEFI) and even IDE. Plus real serial, parallel, and PS/2 ports.

I was looking at this stuff earlier this year and also noted that prices were significantly higher compared to Phenom II for very little gain. Without the artificial trap of software requiring SSE4, etc. there is hardly any advantage. Even though I prefer AMD to Intel, I looked at Intel motherboards too but prices seemed high for those as well. Everywhere it's like $70 for 8-year-old boards, unless they are a nonstandard form factor that don't work with a normal ATX case and power supply.

Without the artificial trap of software requiring SSE4, etc. there is hardly any advantage

Also UEFI, native NVME boot support on later motherboards and AVX support. Compared to Sandy Bridge platform, Bulldozer/Piledriver had better PCIe lane management. AM3+ is a neat platform, if you can get it cheap.

Personally I view these as (hopefully) durable retro machines for now - planning on a decent WinXP box, perhaps also dual booting Win7.

Already have a few motherboards (even got a Sabertooth 990FX R2.0 for 20 euro some time ago).
If not the fastest thing around, I was hoping at least the (assumed) build quality would make it last a few decades more, for WinXP etc...
The Sabertooth is perhaps not quite as good as an Asus Formula Crosshair V, but still....

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The Sabertooth is perhaps not quite as good as an Asus Formula Crosshair V, but still....

Crosshair has additional CPU connector, so it can push 5 Ghz without a sweat, but it's useless. Biggest hurdle in FX overclocking is NB frequency (tied to L3 cache speed), which improves performance much better than raw CPU clock. In other words: 4.5 Ghz CPU / 2600 NB is better than 5 GHz CPU / 2200 NB.

Anders- wrote on 2021-10-12, 19:59:

It's just market forces at play, no big deal...
Same reason you seen things like model m keyboards put up for lots of money.

Well, at least I can understand WHY* the model M is sought after, and lack of availability increases the prices.... 😆
(*: much less so with these FX8320 etc CPUs... weird 'market', heh....)

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To early for that and there's no problem in availability, unlike Pentium gold toppers.

German page golem.de just has the topic "So schnell ist AMDs Bulldozer heute" "So fast is AMD's Bulldozer today"
https://www.golem.de/news/fx-8150-8370-9590-i … 110-159505.html
They have a comparison of performance with CPUs from today on page 2.